Heat sinks are often used to cool electronic components of a computer system, the heat sinks being brought into the best possible thermal contact with the electronic components, for example, plug-in cards. Such heat sinks are generally characterized by a large surface and dissipate heat to the surrounding air via convection.
Modern plug-in cards such as what are known as “high-end computing cards”, are characterized by powerful processor units, generally graphics processors with thousands of computing units. Particularly, CPU-intensive parts of software applications are outsourced to these plug-in cards for quicker processing to relieve the load of a central processor. High-end computing cards are intended for use in 1U or 2U server rack systems. These server rack systems have special cooling systems which dissipate the high heat loss of the high-end computing cards resulting from high computing power. However, particularly due to the fact that such plug-in cards nowadays are only offered with passive cooling, the high-end computing cards are not suitable or are only suitable to a limited extent for use in a desktop or tower system. We found in practice that a flow of cool air of a conventional desktop or tower system is not sufficient to adequately cool high-end computing cards and, therefore, the cards are overheated. As a result, this may lead to a malfunction or a complete failure of the high-end computing cards.